Interview Part 1 T. Casey Brennan - Interview by Dave Sim The Interview In December of 1972, T. Casey Brennan made a weekend sojourn to Kitchener, Ontario. The following questions and answers are taken from a lengthy interview session which took place at Now and Then Books during Mr. Brennan's visit. * * * Sim: Do you think that the early comic books before the code, like the early war and horror books, had any effects on the kids who read them? TCB: Yes, I think it was a good effect because it showed the violence while showing the effects of that same violence. What you get especially today in cartoons and funny comic books and strips, is a situation where you'll have a character, say, pushed off a cliff an he is none the worse for wear. It's just an annoyance and no real injury is involved. In fact, one psychologist pointed out that it's rather frightening when you think that kids can be watching a television show, watch a character be pushed off a cliff, and not even flinch because they know that there's nothing going to happen. After the comics code, even in the serious comics, you had war comics where men went off to war and nobody got maimed. There were no legs and arms being blown off, no blood dripping down the chin as you would see in the comics before the code. It just seemed to portray violence as a sort of a game, like the violence of the Batman TV show. Violence was a big game. Compare the Batman TV show with the Batman punches where no one really gets hurt to, say, a fight scene or a beating scene out of an EC where you've got teeth being knocked out, blood and all the effects of the violence shown. Compare a Road Runner cartoon where the coyote gets pushed off a cliff and is just rather annoyed with it, with an EC comic where a guy gets pushed off a cliff and then he'd be at the bottom with a bone puncturing his skin and just totally broken and a mass of blood and guts. That's the way it should be shown. If you're going to show violence at all, you should show the results of that violence. I think it's very harmful if you don't show the results of that violence. I did a story like that in Warren in Creepy #37, the issue after "On the Wings of a Bird." It was a story called "The Cutthroat Cat Blues" about the kind of attitudes that violent funny cartoons were putting across. That's when I think our magazines are doing just great. I'm glad that we've finally got comics on the stands now that are showing violence as it really is. Sim: Would sales improve for Warren if they had a lot of blood, gore and violence prominently displayed in the magazines? TCB: I like our covers the way they are. We have very artistic covers and we always have had them. Those are the covers, I think, that sell best. I want to be able to do whatever I want to do in these magazines, as long as there is a definite purpose in what I'm doing. I've thought up some very violent stores for Jim Warren, some of the most violent that I've hear of being published. If I write a story that is violent, there has got to be a purpose to it. I think that the Warren people can tell when a story is violent for the purpose of making a batter story of whether a story is violent for the sake of violence. I don't think that they are fond of publishing stories that are genuinely in bad taste. Sim: How did you happen to have your first Warren script accepted? TCB: What happened at that time was that (Archie) Goodwin and most of Warren's staff had left him. This was in the winter of '67 and '68. Warren was going through some financial difficulties at that time. He had lost some of his best people. So, just by sheer coincidence, I had sent Jim Warren a script in the hopes that Goodwin, missing a deadline, might want to use something freelance. And, I sent it at the proper time and he wrote back and said that he'd be using it and I got a cheque for twenty-five dollars and that was how I started. They bought very little from me in those days. They were buying very little from anybody. They were mostly using reprints. My first published story was called "Family Curse" which wasn't printed until 1969. I sold one story in 1968 and one story in 1969. And the second story I submitted was printed in record time, just a few moths later, and it was published in Eerie #22. It was "Family Curse" and Tony Williamsune was the artist. It was just a typical horror story. At that time I couldn't afford to be experimental. I wanted to work my way in by doing average horror stores. My second published work, I believe, was "Death of a Stranger" in Creepy #31, and I'm rather proud of that story. I think my third publication was "On the Wings of a Bird" in Creepy #36, at least that was by first really big story for Warren. "Death of a Stranger" was bit too obscure. "On the Wings of Bird" was very direct. Sim: A lot of stories you say you are writing, like the ones about despair, suffering and so on with these themes in them, must be going over the heads of a lot of the people who read Warren magazines. TCB: I don't know. I'd hate to think that my stories are going over the heads of the majority. But still, I think the kids can understand a lot more than we give them credit for, even the eleven and twelve year olds. I'm really impressed with the quality of the letters that Warren gets and the fan letters that I get. I am very impressed with the things that kids can understand that some of us don't think they can understand. I'm definitely writing for intellectual readers. But I don't assign those readers any particular age. I don't say that they are necessarily college age or anything else, because there are intelligent comic book readers at all ages. When I was eleven and twelve, I was reading and enjoying the more intellectual comic book work. Man in Black #1 was a really intellectually-oriented comic book as I recall. It was the kind of work I liked - the kind of work I think a lot of kids like. The trouble is that there are too many publishers and editors that are trying to play the same roles as the educators are, and give the kids meaningless pabulum. They're writing down to them and I don't think that's necessary. Sim: What do you predict for comic books, in general, in the future? TCB: I think that the publishers are going to continue to look for new means of marketing comics - new ways of putting comic books back on the stands. What happened was that twenty years ago, after the horror book scare, a lot of retail outlets stopped handling comics and today there aren't that many places that stock the actual colour comic book. The drug stores, for the most part, sell drugs and they may have a small magazine counter, but no comic book stand. Comic books are virtually unheard of in candy stores. The small grocery stores sometimes sell comics, but most people do their shopping at K-Mart and such which don'' handle comics, except for comic-packs perhaps. So people have been coming out with these new ideas for getting comic books onto the magazine stands. I guess the first idea they came out with was Mad which was, as far as I know, the first magazine-size funny comic book. And that went on the magazine stands. And after Mad's imitators came along, then came Creepy, another entirely new idea - the first serious magazine-size comic. And that went on the magazine stands. And then you had the Digest comics; you had the paperback book collections of comics; you had the comic books, four in a plastic bag to go to the supermarkets. Again with the latest think, Jim Warren has come out with something no one in the U.S. has come out with before, and that's the five dollar Dracula book to be sold in book stores. This is strictly for adults because no kid is going to say, "Mom, can I have five dollars to go to the store and buy Dracula?" So that's a new idea in comic books - the idea of a quarterly to be sold in book stores for a high price and for adults only; not in the sense that 'adults only' has come to mean in comic books and other magazines - that it's dirty. It's just good work. Special thanks to Sheri Admans for typing all this into the computer for me. Page created January 17, 1997 Web Author-Donald Van Horn Page design © 1997 Donald Van Horn